NYCSubwayGirl loves to share about cool discoveries in NYC. City Lore has amazing advocacy and outreach within NYC communities. They support the arts in ways that are more important than ever before. City Lore documents, presents, and advocates for grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories, histories, places, and traditions. It's thanks to City Lore that I have information to provide street performers who want to know their rights.

I wasn't singing in the subway's back in the '70's and '80's (honestly never occured to me until the late '90's) but I do remember the graffiti on and in the trains , they are captured in an amazing exhibition that opens tonight at the City Lore gallery. Hope you join me.

Shot during the “Golden Age of Graffiti” in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Chalfant and Cooper’s images of graffitied subway cars are among the major documents of American popular culture in the late twentieth century. Moving Murals presents their images in a way that they have never been seen in New York: a wall to wall mosaic of over 850 muraled trains, creating an ultimate All City graffiti trainyard environment complimented by wallpapered photographs of the writers in their element. And for the first time, the exhibit provides an interactive audience experience through the addition of Chalfant’s recently published iBook viewed on a large screen, complete with the train image archive, artist interviews, and videos.

These classic train murals, which have been the inspiration and guide for thousands of youthful artists around the world, did not survive on the trains for long before the city cleaned the cars, or the artists’ rivals painted over them. Chalfant and Cooper’s patience and determination in hunting down and capturing these ephemeral masterpieces with their cameras has left the world with a representative cross section of some of the best work by the most talented young artists who painted New York City’s subway cars in the seventies and eighties. These images pay homage to the young artists from the City’s underserved outer boroughs whose work—though often dismissed as vandalism—challenged contemporary fine arts standards, and lit the fuse for the street art and hip hop explosion heard around the world.

Where: The City Lore Gallery, 56 E 1st St. New York, NY 10003

How to get there: Take the F train to 2nd Ave or 6 train to Bleecker St.